China Study Group: Chuang Collective, "Sorghum & Steel" - Part 1 CONTINUED

"The first few years after 1949 were also a period in which the Party was allowed time to experiment with its own forms of industrial administration and prepare for the halting of the capitalist transition, the expropriation of the urban elites and the implementation of a nationwide educational system open to people regardless of class background. The Northeast had fallen under the control of the revolutionaries early on and much of its industrial structure was transferred directly to management by workers (followed by Soviet technicians) paired with ownership by the state. It was, therefore, one of the first regions in which experiments with non-capitalist forms of production were initiated ..."

This is a continuation of our part one meetup to allow extra time for this fascinating chapter. See details below:

你好, readers!

What can we learn from the Chinese Revolution? That's the question we'll seek to answer as LMRG brings the heat to you once again, now on Tuesday nights, with our all-new China Study Group. In this long-form reading series, we'll meet monthly for in-depth discussion of a series of texts on China, its revolution, the socialist market economy, and more. As the New Cold War heats up, it's never been more important to learn what we can about the country which the US, UK and EU have all described - following the American phrasebook - as a "systemic rival".

For the first set of meetups within this series, we'll be tackling Sorghum and Steel: The Socialist Developmental Regime and the Forging of China by the Chuang collective. Chuang is an independent, autonomous collective of anti-authoritarian Chinese communists and labour activists whose work provides a rare opportunity for English readers to get vital detail on historical and contemporary dynamics within Chinese society from a materialist, communist, and crucially - balanced perspective. Sorghum and Steel will provide our Study Group with an essential foundation in Chinese history to equip us going forward.

We'll be reading the introduction and finishing chapter one - find the text here: https://chuangcn.org/journal/one/sorghum-and-steel/

Throughout this series, we'll give equal space to a wide variety of sources, from anti-authoritarian Chinese communists opposed to the contemporary Politburo to members of Xi Jinping's own ideological brain-trust. We'll dig deep into elements of the Chinese revolutionary experience such as the CPC's localist co-operative economics of the Civil War period, the forgotten grass roots of the Cultural Revolution, the Boulan Fazheng period and China's rejection of "shock therapy" as seen in the USSR, and the theory underpinning China's recent turn away from the liberal economics of the 2000s.

Take care everyone and happy reading!